Optimizing Java: theory and practice

✍ Scribed by Budimlic, Zoran; Kennedy, Ken

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 1997
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 180 KB
• Volume: 9
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 1040-3108
• DOI: 10.1002/(sici)1096-9128(199706)9:6<445::aid-cpe301>3.0.co;2-l

✦ Synopsis

The enormous popularity of the Internet has made an instant star of the Java programming language. Java's portability, reusability, security and clean design has made it the language of choice for Web-based applications and a popular alternative to C++ for object-oriented programming. Unfortunately, the performance of the standard Java implementation, even with just-in-time compilation technology, is far behind the most popular languages today. The need for an aggressive optimizing compiler for Java is clear.

Building on preliminary experience with the JavaSoft bytecode optimizer, this paper explores some of the issues that arise in building efficient implementations of Java. A number of interesting problems are presented by the Java language design, making classical optimization strategies much harder to implement. On the other hand, Java presents the opportunity for some new optimizations, unique for this language.